All posts tagged Employment

Prospective applicants wait in line in front of the headquarters for Local 12 Heat and Frost Insulators Friday.

The jack hammering began around two in the morning Friday, eliminating any chance of sleep for the 40 people camped out on a desolate sidewalk in Long Island City.

“It’s going to be a rough weekend,” said Gerard Feeley, 19 years old, who, like the other men (and one woman), arrived Thursday night and set up camp outside Heat and Frost Insulators Local 12. They plan to stay until Monday morning, when the union will distribute 100 applications for its apprenticeship program. Read More »

A New York state judge has rejected a lawsuit by five Brooklyn Law School graduates who claimed they were misled by the school regarding the success of its graduates in finding high-paying legal employment.

New York City may be recovering from the recession with strong gains in number of jobs available, but a new study shows that more New Yorkers are getting stuck in low-wage occupations that offer little chance of upward mobility.

A report by the Center for an Urban Future released Thursday showed the number of New Yorkers working in low-wage jobs has increased over the last five years. In 2012, 35 % of New Yorkers over 18 worked in a low-wage occupations, up from 31.1 %in 2007. The national average for Americans is around 28%, according to the report. The percentage is especially high in the Bronx and Brooklyn, where almost half of employed adults are working in low-wage positions.

And while the number of jobs available is positive, when viewed against the cost of living in the city, a worrying picture emerges of “working poor” just scraping by, says director of the Center for an Urban Future, Jonathan Bowles. Read More »

Security guards are paid more in New York than the rest of the nation, and the profession is drawing an older, more educated workforce than it did eight years ago, according to a report to be released Thursday.

Hourly median wages for security guards in New York City, when adjusted for inflation, rose 10% to $12.99 between 2004 and 2011. Nationwide, wages in the industry increased 1% in the same period. The authors of the paper attribute the increase in New York to the industry becoming more unionized, which they say has boosted pay and improved benefits.

“I thought it was really striking to see how much of an impact that really had in lifting median wages, not just for the unionized workers,” said Nancy Rankin, co-author of the report by the Community Service Society of New York, an anti-poverty group. Read More »

The Bronx and Brooklyn continued to post the highest rates of unemployment in the city in June, highlighting the disparity in jobless rates among the five boroughs.

According to non-seasonally adjusted numbers from the state Department of Labor, Bronx’s unemployment rate was 14%, up from 12.1% a year ago. Kings County’s rate rose to 11% from 9.7% a year ago.

Unemployment in New York, Queens and Richmond counties were lower, at 8.8%, 9.3% and 9.4%, respectively. Jobless rates tend to be higher in the Bronx and Brooklyn primarily because of demographic factors like education levels, said Elena Volovelsky, labor market analyst for the Department of Labor. Read More »

Jobseekers stand in line to attend the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. career fair in New York last month.

The New York City area has officially regained all 228,000 jobs lost during the recession, according to a briefing Wednesday by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

But behind the overall employment progress lurks a potentially troubling pattern: middle-skilled positions are vanishing as the region experiences a long-term trend of “job polarization.” In place of those middling jobs (think: administrative assistants and machine operators), the local economy has seen a simultaneous expansion of both high- and low-skill positions (financial analysts and housekeepers).

Since middle-skill jobs are the tickets to middle-class livelihoods, this hollowing out at the center of the labor market partly explains why there’s been a “sharper than average” increase in income inequality in the area, said Richard Deitz, a senior economist at the New York Fed. Read More »

Wall Street employment rose 5.4% in February from a year ago, but the pace of job growth slowed as banks reported slightly lower monthly headcounts in areas such as securities brokerage, according to the New York State Department of Labor.

Overall, Wall Street — a key contributor to New York state and New York City’s economy –reported 169,400 professionals, up from 160,700 a year earlier, and 169,100 in January. The financial services industry has added 8,700 jobs from a year ago, but grew by just 300 in February.

“The industry does have a lot of seasonality to it,” said James Brown, an analyst with the Labor Department, in an interview. Banks tend to “cut back at the beginning of the year, but we usually get a slow buildup after that,” he said, adding that Wall Street is still 10,000 jobs above its low in January 2010.

The 169,400 total for Wall Street is the highest monthly employment total since March 2009, though the industry reached the same such milestone when the Labor Department published its January statistics. Read More »

The New York Fed’s contribution to the latest Federal Reserve beige book report noted that the economy in the region, which includes parts of New Jersey and Connecticut, was generally stronger since the last report in June. The New York report was more upbeat than many of the other districts.

As previously reported by The Journal, the beige book confirms that there is some strength in the finance sector. “A securities-industry contact notes that, while there are ongoing layoffs in certain areas related to mergers and restructuring, major firms are hiring in the areas of accounting, compliance, and systems development,” the report said. “Compensation at large financial firms is reported to be holding relatively steady.”

As the financial-services sector picks up, there is more demand for support positions. Read More »